Singer and DJ Boy George has agreed to pay £10,000 libel damages to a London nightclub employee he had claimed had deserved to be hit.

Boy George - real name George O'Dowd - punched Andrew Thompson in a club in June 2000, the High Court heard.

In November 2002, Mr O'Dowd said in a magazine that Mr Thompson was to blame for the assault for insulting him.

Mr O'Dowd accepted on Wednesday that he had been wrong to hit Mr Thompson and to make his later allegations.

Mr Thompson's solicitor, Hanna Basha, told Mr Justice Tugendhat that Mr O'Dowd had "accepted that he should not have assaulted the claimant [Mr Thompson] and paid him substantial compensation for the injury and distress caused".

Ms Basha added the Culture Club singer had agreed to pay Mr Thompson damages, his legal costs and had apologised for the distress the articles had caused.

In November 2002 an interview with Mr O'Dowd was published in Boyz, a magazine which is distributed mainly in London gay venues.

In the article, Mr O'Dowd said Mr Thompson had insulted and provoked him deserved to be punched hard and blamed him for the incident.

The following month, Mr O'Dowd repeated his claims when he wrote an account of the events in his Sunday Express column.

Mr O'Dowd then refused Thompson's requests to withdraw the allegations and apologise, said Ms Basha.

The singer rose to fame as the frontman of 1980s group Culture Club.

The band had huge success before eventually splitting. O'Dowd also suffered from heroin addiction, but is now rehabilitated.

He has since gone on to be a successful club DJ and he created the West End and Broadway musical Taboo.